Kazuki Takahashi

• 1. Introduction

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  Kazuki Takahashi, the manga artist who created Yu-Gi-Oh!, owed part of his career to a humiliation in front of a classroom. A homeroom teacher once called him "a poop-making machine" before his classmates. The teacher claimed that all he did was "eat, sleep, and poop". The insult enraged him, and the anger pointed him toward a single goal: becoming a manga artist. What happens to a teenager who sets that goal and then fails his first big audition? How poor can a working cartoonist get before a hit arrives? And how does a comic serial turn into a card game that holds a world record? There is also a darker question, about a day in the waters off Okinawa.

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• 2. Tokyo Beginnings

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  Kazuo Takahashi was born in Tokyo on the 4th of October 1961. As a child he copied his favorites onto paper, including Tiger Mask, Ultraman, Space Battleship Yamato, Mazinger Z, Devilman and Kamen Rider. He also played tennis in his youth. In his second year of high school, he set his sights on becoming a background animator at Tezuka Productions. He planned to quit school the moment he passed the recruitment exam. He failed, because his drawing was not yet at the standard the industry expected. Animation was off the table, so he took work designing corporate logos and banners, including panels for pachislot machines. Those were the years when he began mailing his manga to publishers. His first prize would come under a name that was not his own.

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• 3. Pen Names and Poverty

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  In 1981, at the age of 20, Takahashi won the Shogakukan New Comic Award for a one-shot called Ing! Love Ball. He had entered it as Hajime Miyabi. It ran in Weekly Shōnen Sunday the same year. More one-shots followed under that name. Kyōgaku Sensen SOS!!, Ano Ko ni Scramble and Yū Yua Yū appeared in 1982, and Hajimemashite Ran Desu!! came in 1983. His first serial arrived in 1986. Gō-Q-Chōji Ikkiman adapted a television sports anime of the same name and ran in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine. Takahashi later described this stretch as one of extreme poverty. His home had no electricity, and he spoke of thirty-six credit card installments. George Morikawa, author of Hajime no Ippo, remembered Takahashi's home of that era as the kind of run-down Showa-era wooden apartment anyone would picture at once. The early works earned little, so Takahashi moved to the publisher Shueisha. His one-shot Tokiō no Taka appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1990. Battle Mind followed in 1991, and Tennenshoku Danji Buray ran in the same magazine from 1991 to 1992. Four years after Buray ended, he would return to that magazine under yet another name.

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• 4. The Yu-Gi-Oh! Phenomenon

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  In 1996, signing for the first time as Kazuki Takahashi, he launched Yu-Gi-Oh! in Weekly Shōnen Jump. The serial ran until 2004 and sold more than 40 million copies. An anime television series followed. So did a trading card game developed by Konami. That card game earned the Guinness World Record as the best-selling trading card game in history. As of 2011, more than 25.1 billion cards had been sold. After the original manga finished, Takahashi stayed involved as a supervisor. His assistants produced spin-off adaptations under his oversight. Akira Itō made Yu-Gi-Oh! R, Naoyuki Kageyama made Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, and Masashi Sato made Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. Takahashi also took part in animation production for two films, Yu-Gi-Oh! Bonds Beyond Time and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions. Yet he kept making new work of his own alongside the franchise.

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• 5. Later Projects and Honors

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  In 2010, a short piece called Button went up on the official website of Studio Dice. His list of works also includes three episodes of anime shorts that he made himself. The one-shot Drump appeared in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2013. Two years later, Comic-Con International gave him the Inkpot Award for outstanding contributions to comics. In 2018, he returned to Weekly Shōnen Jump with a limited series called The Comiq. The following year brought a crossover with an American publisher. In September 2019, Shōnen Jump+ released Secret Reverse, a two-part manga he wrote and illustrated for the Marvel × Shōnen Jump+ Super Collaboration. The look of all this work came from a deliberate set of influences.

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• 6. Tools and Influences

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  Takahashi's early art leaned toward comical gekiga, shaped by traditional anime. Later, three very different illustrators left a deep mark on him: Drew Struzan, Alphonse Mucha and Norman Rockwell. His traditional tools were the g-pen, watercolors and Copic markers. For work after the manga serialization, he used the programs Adobe Photoshop and Painter.

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• 7. Games, Heroes and a Shiba Inu

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  Shogi, mahjong, card games and tabletop role-playing games were all favorite pastimes of Takahashi. His reading tastes ran wide. He named Doraemon and Mataro ga Kuru!! by Fujiko Fujio among his favorites. He also loved Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki and Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama. American comics appealed to him too, and Hellboy was his favorite character from them. He was a great fan of wrestling and admired Antonio Inoki. A shiba inu named Taro was his pet, and the dog became the model for a Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game monster, Shiba-Warrior Taro. Takahashi drew the card's artwork himself. Occasionally his politics reached his art. Before the 2019 House of Councillors election, he posted an Instagram drawing of Yu-Gi-Oh! characters criticizing Shinzo Abe's government. It urged followers to "vote for justice". He later apologized. Away from the drawing desk, he loved sea diving, and he visited the Okinawa seaside every July.

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• 8. The Water Off Nago

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  On the 6th of July 2022, Japan Coast Guard officers found Takahashi dead in the water, 300 metres off the shore of Nago, Okinawa. A passing boat had reported the body. He was wearing snorkeling gear, and the cause of death was determined to be drowning. Later reports changed the picture of his last hours. They said he had died in the afternoon of the 4th of July while helping to rescue three others caught in a rip current.

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